Sunday, July 18, 2010

Double Blech

Forgive me for not being very descriptive. I had planned on writing the majority of this post last night once game 2 ended just so I’d have it ready, but the lengthy rain delay and extra innings kind of ruined that plan. Plus, I didn’t see game 1, so I can’t comment on that too much. You’d think Justin Verlander could easily win if he’s up 3-0 before he even throws a pitch, but that wasn’t the case. The only run scoring I saw was the wild pitch, and it definitely looked like a blockable ball. Meanwhile, I guess the story on the offensive side was that all the rallies kept getting squelched by good defensive plays. Okay, I understand how sometimes the Tigers make bad pitchers look good, and I understand how sometimes our pitchers get lit up by teams that don’t hit much. There’s some level of control there. What I don’t understand is how the Tigers can cause a bad defensive team to turn in an entire Web Gem segment of sparkling plays. Logic would dictate that you CAN’T cause that, and yet it just keeps on happening.

Game 2 featured a very encouraging outing from Rick Porcello. He looked like he did the last time I saw him, maybe a little bit better. The key stat of the night was zero walks, after Scherzer and Verlander both walked five batters. However, the bullpen eventually couldn’t hold it. Robbie Weinhardt just could not get the final out of the eleventh inning. Meanwhile, a lot of the fans seem to be blaming the offense problems in this game on Leyland. I don’t really get that. Take the first inning, for example. The Tigers have the bases loaded with nobody out and Miguel Cabrera at the plate. What is Leyland supposed to do there to change the outcome of that inning? Leyland, for his part, seemed to think Game 2 was due to some sort of lack of effort. At least, that’s what his tone suggested. It was a rough night for Cabrera. His lone hit should have been a double but he thought it was a home run and only ended up at first. He immediately realized he had screwed up, because he kept looking in the direction of the Tigers’ dugout, pointing to himself and saying “My bad” (one of the rare instances where I could read his lips), but you could tell Leyland wasn’t happy about it.

Well, Rick Porcello put up a good outing. Now it’s time for Andy Oliver to make his move. Someone will have to be sent down on Tuesday to make room for Armando Galarraga, and it’s likely to be one of those two. Oliver’s been in the rotation for almost a month and he’s still looking for his first win. And his outings have gotten increasingly rough. Obviously, none of the Indians have seen him, unless someone got called up from double A and I don’t know about it. Meanwhile, the Indians will have a starting pitcher making his major league debut: Jeanmar Gomez. I had read earlier that they were considering David Huff for this start (He blanked the Mud Hens over six or seven innings on the Fourth of July), and I don’t know what happened to that planned. Anyways, Gomez’s triple A numbers aren’t particularly enticing. His ERA is 5.70, and that’s over 18 starts (so it’s not like he just got called up to Columbus and the ERA is in that wildly fluctuating state). Still, I’d hazard a guess that none of the Tigers have seen him before.